thors think that the impulse to
sacrifice is the main religious phenomenon. It is a prominent, a
universal phenomenon certainly, and lies deeper than any special creed.
Here, for instance, is what seems to be a spontaneous example of it,
simply expressing what seemed right at the time between the individual
and his Maker. Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan divine, is
generally reputed a rather grotesque pedant; yet what is more
touchingly simple than his relation of what happened when his wife came
to die?

"When I saw to what a point of resignation I was now called of the
Lord," he says, "I resolved, with his help, therein to glorify him.
So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by her
bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest in the
world. With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely gave her up
unto the Lord: and in token of my real RESIGNATION, I gently put her
out of my hands, and laid away a most lovely hand, resolving that I
would never touch it more. This was the hardest, and perhaps the
bravest action that ever I did. She ... told me that she signed and
sealed my act of resignation. And though before that she called for me
continually, she after this never asked for me any more."[180]

[180] B. Wendell: Cotton Mather, New York, no date, p. 198.

Father Vianney's asceticism taken in its totality was simply the result
of a permanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm, longing to make
proof of itself. The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion,
collected all the motives towards asceticism together, and so codified
them that any one wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a
practical system mapped out for him in any one of a number of
ready-made manuals.[181] The dominant Church notion of perfection is of
course the negative one of avoidance of sin. Sin proceeds from
concupiscence, and concupiscence from our carnal passions and
temptations, chief of which are pride, sensuality in all its forms, and
the loves of worldly excitement and possession. All these sources of
sin must be resisted; and discipline and austerities are a most
efficacious mode of meeting them. Hence there are always in these
books chapters on self-mortification. But whenever a procedure is
codified, the more delicate spirit of it evaporates, and if we wish the
undiluted ascetic spirit--the passion of self-contempt wreaking itself
on the poor flesh, the divine irra